GREEK TRAGEDY IN A NEW MASK SPEAKS TO TODAY'S AUDIENCES

Arthur Holmbeg; Arthur Holmberg, who teaches drama at Harvard University, is the North American editor for the ''World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theater.''

Published: March 1, 1987

After slumbering peacefully on library shelves, Greek tragedy has staged a comeback. As far back as 1960, Robert Brustein urged the theater to ''rescue these imprisoned masterpieces from the gray walls of Victorian dullness'' and turn them into the ''immediate, sensual experiences'' they were meant to be. Within the past year or two, some of the world's most imaginative directors have heeded Mr. Brustein's advice. New productions in America, Japan and Europe prove that the Greeks were master craftsmen of the stage, weaving together poetry, music, dance and visual effects in a seamless cloth of pure theatrical magic.

If one were to have seen recent productions by Andrei Serban, Robert Wilson, Peter Sellars, Lee Breuer, Tadashi Suzuki, Yukio Ninagawa and others in New York, Cambridge, Washington, Minneapolis and Chicago, as well as in Paris, Berlin, Dusseldorf and Munich, it would be hard to doubt the astounding stage power of the Greeks. These radical remountings of classical tragedy succeed by tapping into the vitality of dance and music and by addressing such basic issues as male-female relationships, the allocation of power in society and the destructiveness of war. In the hands of the world's leading avant-garde directors, the world's oldest plays have taken on new life.

Today's audiences respond to these plays with a new sensitivity, because the 80's are a tragic decade. A tragic sense of life has seeped, perhaps for the first time, into the American consciousness. AIDS has cast its pall everywhere, and the facile opitimism of both enlightened liberalism and the early Reagan years has vanished, baffled by the realities of a shrinking middle class and the failure to achieve racial parity. The Greeks knew and dramatized how elusive, fragile and important the ideal of justice was. Tragedies, written for public festivals, celebrated the state and, at the same time, called into question its official rhetoric.

Greek tragedy has attracted so many experimental directors and choreographers, like Martha Graham and George Balanchine, because it liberates the imagination from the straitjacket of social realism. It enables visionaries to explore the poetry of the stage. ''We must return to the Greeks,'' Mr. Sellars says, ''to learn their theatrical lessons. Most contemporary plays read like juvenile sitcoms. Movies and television have destroyed the lyricism of the theater.'' In recent years, avant-garde directors have also matured artistically. They can now approach such difficult texts as Greek tragedy with a theatrical wisdom honed by years of experimentation. In the case of Mr. Breuer, Mr. Sellars and Mr. Wilson, many critics felt that these recent productions represent their most polished work to date.

Different as these various productions have been, they all succeed in feeling their way back to the ritual heartbeat of Greek theater. Although scholars bicker, most agree that tragedy began in the frenzied rites sung round the altar of Dionysius -what Ezra Pound called the ''God-dance.'' But the chorus - the unique structural feature of tragedy - almost always proved a stumbling block in modern stagings. These recent productions have turned the chorus from an embarrassment into a strength. To do so, they have used music, movement and poetry to create hypnotic aural and visual rhythms.

Originally, Greek theater looked and sounded more like an opera-ballet than modern spoken drama. Nietzsche insisted that the spirit of tragedy could never be expressed by words alone; it needed music. And Karl Jaspers, the German existentialist, insisted that tragic knowledge should be experienced as concrete, visual images to preserve its ''uncommitted, hovering character.'' By exploring new ways to deploy the chorus, these productions have simultaneously released the religious impulse behind tragedy as well as its theatrical energy.

The revival from the early 1970's of Mr. Serban's production of ''Fragments of a Greek Trilogy'' - currently at La Mama through March 15 - has been praised for its savage power. By stitching together a stage language of ancient Greek and Latin pierced by human cries, Mr. Serban has created a sensuous sound spectrum that explores not the meanings of words but their music. By riveting the audience's attention on the physicality of language - its pitch, volume and timbre - Mr. Serban induces a trance-like state and reveals speech as a powerful orchestra capable of reaching the fringe of consciousness where words cannot go but meaning still exists.

''In the beginning,'' Mr. Serban recently observed, ''words and magic were one. I wanted to spin a pattern of sounds with the power of a mantra. I paid strict attention to the sequencing of vowels and consonants. I wanted to drive the sounds of language into the audience's ear like a nail. I had to ask the actors to produce sounds they had never produced before, sounds that come not from the throat but from the whole body. And if one puts together the right sounds in the right order, a litany is created that reaches the depths of the subconscious. Western theater lost this magic after the Greeks. It's been lying at the bottom of the sea for over 2,000 years. We must keep searching for the key that will unlock their theatrical secrets.''